Talking to Sarah about obsessions, worrying, and other mental bugbears [and why sometimes the best brains gets the worst of this]...

BLOT: (12 Oct 2011 - 04:43:03 PM)

Talking to Sarah about obsessions, worrying, and other mental bugbears [and why sometimes the best brains gets the worst of this]...

Minutes ago, got off the phone with Sarah, and we had been talking about obsessiveness. Not necessarily OCD level, knock three times to make sure you knocked sort of thing, but that bit where you know you have a bill to pay and rather than go "This is a bill and I must pay it. I have paid it. It is paid," you end spending days, maybe weeks, worrying about the paying, worrying about what the paying says about you, worrying about what the worrying about the paying says about you. All in all, even small things become entire swaths of worry and bother quite easily. If you need a term, let's call it Repetitive Loop Obsession, where the weight of the obsessed mental object is equal to a single loop but the felt weight, what you might call the actual weight, is equal to the sum total of all the loops.

On the phone, talked to Sarah about the car situation. If you are of a certain age and have had a car situation, there is little else that needs to be enumerated. Cars break down. They consume limited resources and outside of the routine things like gas and keeping the tires inflated, this consumption tends to come in irregularly spaced lump sums. When they break down, their incremental work of getting you from point A to point B on any given day is suddenly outweighed by a three to five digit cost (i.e. from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars) that comes all once. Your car, assuming you have a car, might only move you bodily back and forth for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, only a few miles, but when faced with the possibility of not having that bodily movement over a period of days, weeks, months, years...a car becomes a massive potential energy sink. The potential for all the things you cannot do versus the potential for all the things you could do with the large sum of money you are about to spend. Hence, the car situation.

Like all Repetitive Loop Obsessions (RLOs), though, the significant and rightly so worry of plunking down twenty-thousand American dollars on a vehicle OR keeping the money and having no reliable transport to do all the things that might need to be done is made even worse as days and weeks of worrying about that choice comes to bear. The car ends up becoming a symbol, a gremlin, representing a certain opposite from peace of mind. The act of buying a car becomes more worrisome and more complicated than the act of owning a car, an act most of us take for granted a great deal of time (see above on tiny bodily movement increments).

I am somewhat digressing on the car thing, but just to set up the process. I think part of the issue with RLOs comes down to a common human tendency to ritualize big (and small) things into recurrent steps for the express purpose of maximizing efficiency when dealing with them. We are all time management engineers, so to speak. Some hobbies, and semi-hobbies, are purposefully designed to waste time. Fishing. For fishing, you have to float or sit for some time and hold certain objects in a particular way until you get a result or run out of time to try for that result any more. A lot of our activities, though, we start to find ways to shortcut around them. Watch a person who plays first person shooters, how they get used to running certain paths, they get used to hitting certain button combinations and interacting with the screen in a particular way. They even develop little bit rituals about the way they move their chair and fidget with the controller in the downtimes of the game.

We break down everything we can in our regular routines into the smallest possible mental blocks and then we repeat those blocks for as long as it takes us to emulate a task unto completion. In other words, we get really good at repetition, actually prefer it on many levels, even when it takes away much of the satisfaction and stimulation out of something. Go into any store, and watch the retail workers. They display this more than most. Hate their job. HATE IT. And yet regularly increase the boredom and dissatisfaction of it by giving into even greater amounts of repetitious behaviour than is required.

Of course we are then going to be in a habit of repeating those things we worry about over and over, and trying to break it down into units that we can cycle back and forth. Not only is it what we do, but because we do it so much we have a lot of "excess" mental flow going on. That is a bad combination. Our brains are motors that is looking for algorithms to run AND they mostly idle around until something gets them to kick up the RPMs. Take a big worry, or a small worry that is not easy compartmentalized, and watch what happens. The brain goes, "Ok, what's the way to get this into procedural chunking routine?" and then realizes it has nothing else to do since it has already figured out how to crunch this data entry task without even really thinking of the numbers in front of it, and then when that worry has no proper formation into a truly chunkable algorithm, it gets tossed in whole and, if anything, pulls in other chunks to it and straps them to it and then gets bashed around in the brain out of shape and out of whack with the easy flow routine that it is actively trying to achieve. The best and brightest brains can be the worst for this since a) they tend to be more obsessive, b) they can handle bigger chunks and so don't merely short out the process, c) they are often better at getting everything else compartmentalized, and d) there is something about us eggheads that makes us stick our head into la-la land in a way that people who are really focused on simply being out and about and alive and happy never will.

Solutions? Well, taking the brain out of idle seems to help some, though you might find the RLO trying to equalize across the field (meaning, you will worry about the car AND try to solve some new puzzle, getting both into a mire). Get the worrisome object into compartments does seem to help. Sit down with tables and charts. Turn it into a timeline. Make the unknown aspects as known as possible. Seriously. Graph it out. Watch it get digested by our great path of least resistence calculator we call brain meat. That will help. Shock your brain with other new things and ideas. Also, engage the "bubble method". Rather than let your thoughts run free, learn how to mentally grab them. Think about how you grab your foot and rub it sometimes to help it feel better, or the way that you might absentmindedly scratch your nose. Treat your thoughts the same way. Lay [mental] hands upon them. And, in some cases, wrap them up in a bubble [picturing this as though it was quite literal can be a useful tool] and then either set that aside or, occasionally, pop it.

That...or take up fishing...

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2011